


The World Could Always Use More Heroes

by asterCrash



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, Mostly Fluff, Wanted to write something as soon as I heard the news, What's better than the heroes being saved by their loved ones?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-21
Updated: 2016-12-21
Packaged: 2018-09-10 21:52:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8940862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asterCrash/pseuds/asterCrash
Summary: It’s just down the road, Emily tried to reassure herself, she’s probably just helping someone whose cat got stuck in a tree. The perils of a superhero girlfriend, you get used to unexpected delays. Still, it was odd that Lena would take this long for a pint of milk on Christmas eve of all nights.
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When you're dating one of the world's greatest heroes, it's natural to worry.





	

“I’ll just dash out to grab some milk,” Lena had said, grabbing her keys off the coffee table and bundling into one of Emily’s coats. “Back in a flash!” She’d given a cheeky wink before heading out the door. Ten minutes ago.

_It’s just down the road,_ Emily tried to reassure herself, _she’s probably just helping someone whose cat got stuck in a tree_. The perils of a superhero girlfriend, you get used to unexpected delays. Still, it was odd that Lena would take this long for a pint of milk on Christmas eve of all nights.

Getting fretful, she grabbed Lena’s bomber jacket off the coatrack. It still smelt like her, like sweat and smoke and home. She swore that girl could run through a field of fertiliser and come out smelling fresher than a bakery. Emily nuzzled her face into the sheepskin interior. It just wasn’t fair to be without her even a minute when they finally had time together.

Sliding the jacket around her (it was a bit small but she made do), she braved the chill outside to head out onto the balcony. Snow was still falling from the sky, a light covering already crunching beneath her feet as she stepped out into the night air. Lena’s friend Mei wasn’t wrong about global warming, but the days where the snow caused enough trouble to shut down even paramilitary flights were Emily’s favourite, and she wasn’t ready to give them up, even if it would be saving the world. She leaves the heroics to her girlfriend, after all.

She looked up and down the street, almost empty apart from a few lonely souls trudging down the sidewalks, probably on errands of their own. You almost couldn’t tell there was a road at all under all that white, until a van came around the corner, and old fashioned thing with honest-to-god wheels, tearing great lines down to the asphalt. _Strange,_ thought Emily, _I thought the roads were closed tonight_. She stared down at the van as it passed, trying to see through the tinted glass of the windshield, but all she could see were two pinpricks of red where the driver should have been.

The smart thing to do would have been to call Winston. He would know what to do, he probably had some way to find out exactly where Lena was any time he wanted. He probably could have called all of Overwatch together to come save her. It would be the smart thing to do.

Lena didn’t fall in love with Emily because she was smart.

Before she knew what she was doing she’d taken a running leap off her balcony and onto the fire escape running down the building next to it. Metal stairs flew past under her feet and then she was on the street, running in the direction of the corner store. She had to know for certain. Her jeans kicked through drift after drift of fresh snow, they’d be soaked soon with meltwater but she couldn’t slow down. She pretended that Lena’s bomber jacket could make her run faster, could make her fly down the street.

The police were already there, talking to the shop owner. Old Mrs. Patel gave her one look and it was all Emily needed to know.

Her bike was already practically buried in snow, but Emily hardly noticed as she ripped the cover off it. Three false starts on the old Vespa was all it took to get it started and then she was off, riding in the black tracks the van had left as fast as she could, while they were still fresh, before the snowfall covered them up entirely. The wind whipped at her bitterly, Lena’s lucky jacket being much less comfort against the cold than it was against loneliness. Emily didn’t care, she gripped the handles of her bike tighter and gave it as much as it could take. Speed limits were for people whose girlfriends didn’t need saving.

The tracks winded and turned through tight streets, with every hundred metres they seemed to get fresher, though already it was becoming hard to tell them from the ground to either side. Emily’s bike kicked up a wake behind her and any other night she’d be having the time of her life, instead of holding on for dear life as her front wheel slipped and wobbled over icy patches. _A helmet,_ she thought, _would have been a good idea_. She’d turned so many times she could barely remember which way was which, though the distant chimes of Big Ben helped to orient her a little. Every corner she rounded she hit the throttle harder, every time it felt like not enough, not enough. She rounded a corner she’d never been down before and shrieked at a brick wall greeted her, losing her balance in an attempt to turn and feeling helplessly as her bike slipped on a patch of ice and went out from beneath her.

She counted her lucky stars that she fell straight into a snow drift, no more painful than a pillow fight. Her bike wasn’t so lucky. Standing up out of the drift, she tried to make sense of where she went wrong. The tracks she was following were almost gone, but they definitely turned into this alley and then ran straight into a brick wall. Her bike wasn’t so much vintage as it was scrap. One of the wheels had come off the mangled wreck entirely, Emily picked it up out of some misplaced sense of comfort. The bad guys had officially pissed her off now. Her girlfriend was kidnapped, her bike was trashed and the trail had gone cold right into this stupid brick wall.

She pressed her ear up against the stonework, trying to listen through, feeling her way along the wall in search of some kind of switch to open the secret passage. There wasn’t time to think of how much danger she could be in trying to break into some evil organisation’s secret base, there wasn’t time to think of how much danger Lena could be in on the inside. All that mattered was the fact that this wall was the biggest obstacle between Emily and her girlfriend curling up together and watching cheesy Christmas movies in dorky sweaters until dawn’s light came to wake them up. Emily’s fingers were near freezing when they brushed against a pipe that didn’t feel like a pipe. She gave it an experimental jerk in one direction, then another, then towards her and finally just pushed in, letting it click into place and open a hidden door in the wall.

It was dark inside, and Emily closed the door behind her without thinking how she was going to find it again. There were voices coming from further in the building, hushed, speaking quickly and quietly with no chit chat. Something about a package, and about a scary someone who was going to pick it up. Emily didn’t care, didn’t want to know. She wasn’t a hero, wasn’t interested in who’s who in crime and chaos. She just wanted her Christmas eve back. She wanted her girlfriend.

Peaking around a corner, she could see she was in some kind of warehouse. Dim lights in the centre of the room illuminating the van, still covered in melting snow, and at the far end, tied to a chair, was Lena. Two guards stood between Emily and Lena, tracksuits looking out of place with their weird helmet mask combo and guns. They had their backs to Emily, all eyes on Lena, as if she could spring from the chair at any moment and tear them to shreds. She probably could, too, if they hadn’t have removed her Chronal Accelerator, Emily could see it lying discarded on a nearby table. She knew there was such a thing as a safe distance for it, far enough away that Lena couldn’t use her powers, but still close enough to keep her alive. She counted her lucky stars that Lena had taken it down to the store with her rather than risk the short trip with it still in their flat.

“I don’t know about hiding this from Widowmaker, you know how she gets about Tracer,” one of the mooks said to the other. Emily moved as slowly as she could from one foot to the other, moving along behind them, trying to find something heavy to swing if they decided to turn around.

“Orders came from up top,” the other bad guy shrugged, “I figure if I piss off her at least she’ll kill me clean. The big wigs, I don’t know.” Emily’s hand found something that felt a lot like a wrench, nice and big.

“Still man, she called d-“ The first mook started to turn and Emily’s heart froze in her chest, “did you hear something?”

Emily prepared to jump up, prepared to swing, prepared to fight for her life. It felt like time slowed to a crawl as the masked man turned around towards her, eyes glowing red with what was probably some high-tech night-vision bullshit that would see her in a second. Instead, he snapped back around, as Lena sat up in her chair and laughed.

It wasn’t her usual laugh, not high pitched and full of life and love and wonder and happiness. No, this was obviously a fake laugh. It was the laugh she put on when she was failing to bluff at poker, the laugh she put on when she wanted to pretend Emily hadn’t seen right through her in an instant. It was a laugh to get the attention of some mooks when your girlfriend is failing her stealth check.

“You’re awful overconfident aren’t’cha?” Lena asked, and for a moment Emily could see why people though she was intimidating. When she was channelling her full hero swagger, she was a force to be reckoned with. “Thinking you’ve got me in the bag already? Don’t you know the heroes always escape?”

“Shut your mouth,” said one of the guards, “you’ll be in Geneva before any of your little friends know you’re missing.”

Lena laughed again, big, fake, distracting laughter that sent a shiver right up Emily’s spine, even as she straightened up and lifted the wrench over her head. “Oh I don’t think so, or haven’t you noticed?” She grinned that fierce grin that made Emily love her all over again. “The cavalry’s here.”

Helmet or no, the first mook crumpled the second Emily’s wrench made contact with his head, dropping to the floor like a sack of potatoes. His buddy didn’t even have time to reach for his gun before Emily swung back across and knocked him clean into the van. He connected with a satisfying crunch and slid down to the ground, groaning before falling unconscious.

“Cheers, love,” said Lena.

Emily was across the room and had her arms around Lena in a second, hugging her for dear life. It took a couple of seconds of fiddling before she was able to undo the ropes holding Lena to the chair so she could reciprocate the embrace. It seemed like the least romantic place in the world but still all she could think about was pressing a hundred tiny kisses into her girlfriend’s face, no matter how much she protested. Eventually she came to her senses long enough to help Lena up and retrieved the Chronal Accelerator from the other side of the room. Then it was back to the usual way of things, Emily in Tracer’s arms, getting raced across the street like lightning, all the way back home in the blink of an eye, never mind that it had been Emily to rescue Lena for once, rather than the cute pilot having to save the whole world on her own.

They were home in a flash, milk forgotten, Lena stripping out of Emily’s coat and Emily out of Lena’s jacket, cuddled up on the couch while Emily fussed and fidgeted at the new bruises and while Lena listened patiently to the tale of woe that had been living half an hour without her. Eventually the night drifted away into their usual pattern, watching movies, talking together about everything they’d never shared with anyone else, holding each other.

As midnight approached, and they both began to drift off to sleep there on the couch, Lena sleepily brushed aside a strand of Emily’s hair and murmured, “you know, the world could always use more heroes.” Though she was far too tired to voice her opinion, Emily disagreed. Lena was the only hero she needed in her life.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy canon queer characters everybody


End file.
